


Morgan Yu Too

by Elamimax



Category: Prey (Video Game 2017)
Genre: Alien Biology, Aliens, Alternate Universe, Female Morgan Yu, Gen, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, Science Fiction, Shapeshifting, Space Stations, Spoilers, Technology, Trans Character, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:21:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23943850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elamimax/pseuds/Elamimax
Summary: Morgan Yu, one of the only survivors of the Talos I incident, realizes that his brother Alex never stopped experimenting after almost everyone on the station was killed through their hubris. But the result of the experiments shakes Morgan to his core, and he realizes he needs to re-evaluate everything he thinks he knows.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 32





	1. Talos IV

“Hey. Morgan. Wake up. You’re burning daylight.”

“Alex, that wasn’t funny the first time.” Morgan Yu rubbed his face as he sat upright on the edge of his bed. He felt the slightest twinge of dizziness. Wonderful. He hated the simulated gravity of smaller satellites. 

“Sorry. Force of habit,” Alex, his brother, said on the line. He didn’t sound very sorry. Morgan got up and looked out of the small porthole down at earth. Big blue ball, once upon a time. Now mostly yellow. Still beautiful. Still looked like home, in a way. Morgan had a lot of complicated feelings about the yellow miasma that had overtaken what was once home to billions of people, their memories conglomerated in the yellow coral. “I need you to come to the research wing when you can.” There was a slight pause on the line. “Don’t forget to wear your suit.”

Morgan resisted the urge to fling the transcribe across the room. It hovered half a second above his hand before he thought better of it, and went to the bathroom. The almost-but-not-quite gravity of Talos IV -- because naming it Titanic 2 would have been too on-the-nose -- was annoying, but it was better than not being able to take showers. The hot water ran down his body. It had always been useful to him. 

“Learn to respect it,” his father had once told him, one of the few lessons that hadn’t been needlessly harsh, or cruel for that matter. “It is the greatest tool you will ever own. If you maintain it well, it will not fail you.” He hadn’t been wrong. Morgan had always taken care of his body, treating it with respect. He wondered if that perspective, one that had been imprinted in him at an early age, had been what had caused the disconnect. It was a tool, and he’d maintained it meticulously. But he had little affinity for it. Things hadn’t improved with the Talos I incident. Now, with all the Typhon material coursing through his skull -- and probably most of the rest of him -- it felt more alien than ever. 

He walked up to the sink as he toweled himself off and grabbed his brush, glad that the mirror was fogged up. He wasn’t in the mood for a face-to-face with someone he’d learned to distrust on board the Talos I. Past-him wasn’t present-him. He detested the person from before, before the experiments and the amnesia. That person was responsible for too much human suffering. He shook his head as he brushed his teeth.

Hoisting himself into the suit, he felt a chill run up his spine. He almost never wore the suit around the station, usually sticking with slacks and a shirt. It fit too snugly, reminded him of too many things. It wasn’t the same suit, of course. Not that that mattered. It smelled the same and it felt the same. But the old one had saved his life and if Alex, damn him, told Morgan to put it on, he was going to be a fool to refuse. Alex seemed innocent enough at a glance, but he never said or did anything without reason. Alex always had a backup plan. 

Morgan gently nudged the cup on his small counter. It was a force of habit. He hadn’t seen a mimic in a long time but he still couldn’t bring himself to trust cups. The ceramic mug refused to turn into a Typhon, so he filled it with coffee and made his way across the station. He didn’t go to the research wing very often. Alex had obviously stopped developing neuromods -- Morgan had made it clear in no uncertain terms he’d happily jettison him out of an airlock if he tried it -- but he was still doing research on the Typhon. Morgan couldn’t fault him. They were trying to figure out a way to preserve what was left of humanity. Being an endangered species was a trip. He walked up to the giant door. 

“Typhon material detected,” the little camera by the door said. He rolled his eyes.

“Blow me,” Morgan said.

“Override detected. Welcome, M. Yu.” Morgan was going to have to have a word with Alex about those scanners. Morgan was the only one with alien material in his system on the small station, so there was no need for scanners. 

There were no Typhon on Talos IV, after all. 

The doors opened and he followed the red line down the corridor. It wasn’t Talos I, but the station was nonetheless a little labyrinthine. Without the colour-coding, you could easily get turned around. And the crew was minimal. Another door, another scan, and Morgan walked into Alex’s research wing.

“Hey, Alex,” Morgan said as he turned the corner.

“Morgan, good t--”

“That’s a phantom, Alex,” Morgan said. He’d frozen in place, the cup halfway up to his lips. 

“I can explain,” Alex began. There was a purple haze around Morgan that had begun to shimmer. Alex knew what his brother could do and did something Morgan had never thought him capable of. Alex stepped between Morgan and the Typhon.

“That thing is going to kill you, Alex,” Morgan said, matter-of-factly. “And then it’s going to do something stupid to this station and it’s going to kill me too.” He looked from the Typhon to his brother. “And then I’m going to come back from the dead, I’m going to resurrect you, and then I’m going to beat you to death all over again with this coffee cup.”

“Morgan,  _ listen to me _ ,” Alex pleaded. Morgan barely was. His attention was fixed on the Typhon, almost daring it to make a move. The creature’s glowing eyes followed Alex’s every move. 

“Listen to him, Morgan,” a voice said. It was a little distorted by the technology, and Morgan squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “This isn’t what you think it is.” The operator’s boxy shape hovered over to the two of them from wherever it had been hiding. 

“Please tell me what I’m thinking, Mikhaila,” Morgan said softly. He was trying his best to stay mad, but Mikhaila made that very difficult. “Because I don’t know myself.”

“We were running an experiment,” another voice said. Igwe. Of course he’d be here too. Morgan turned to Alex.

“What is this? A reunion?” 

“In a sense,” Alex said with a little smile in his voice. If it had been on his face, Morgan might have slapped it right off. His older brother was a stubborn bastard, and had often bullied him as a child. Nowadays, Morgan was probably the most physically capable human being left alive. Not that that was saying much, but Alex had no way of standing up to him. If he wanted to, Morgan could suspend the rest of them and kill the Typhon before they’d even touched the ground. But he wanted to hear this. And, well… Mikhaila was here. Or somewhere. 

“Where are you?” he said to the operators. 

“Talos II,” Operator-Ilyushin said. 

“Your brother thought it was best not to have us all in the same place, Morgan,” Igwe piped in helpfully. Morgan shot Alex a sideways glance. 

“Yeah, he’s pragmatic like that. What’s going on here, Mikhaila?”

Alex, always the helpful bastard, answered for her. Morgan, through a titanic force of will, resisted telling him to shut up. “The Typhon do not possess mirror neurons,” he began, as if he was teaching Morgan all of this, as if Morgan hadn’t figured that out way back when. 

“I know all this, Alex.”

“I know you know, Morgan. Please, hear me out.” Without waiting to see if Morgan was actually going to oblige his request -- or perhaps to make sure Morgan didn’t have the time to change his mind -- he continued. “When you were injected with Typhon material, you became part Typhon. You were able to interface with the coral.” Morgan’s eye twitched.  _ Stop telling me what I already know, _ he wanted to say. But he waited. Just a few more seconds. “We hypothesized it was possible to inject human material into a Typhon,” Alex concluded, as if that was a normal and not totally batshit thing to say. 

“You did what.”

“We injected it with human memories, to see if Typhon can  _ learn _ human empathy.” 

“You’re insane.”

“Perhaps,” Alex said. “But the others agreed. If we are going to survive, as a species, we need to find a way to communicate with them. But they must first want to communicate with us.”

“That’s why… all of this.”

“That,” Alex nodded, “is why we are doing all of this.”

“And the results are truly remarkable,” Igwe said through the operator and hovered over to the phantom who looked at it with… curiosity? “Not only has the memory implant fully taken, but it is actively allowing us to run a simulation to see if we can teach it empathy.”

Morgan finally put his cup down. He’d been so close to punching his brother with it so many times, it was probably better for everyone involved that he didn’t have a ceramic melee weapon in his hand. 

“And what memories are you implanting? Some hyper-empathetic saint whose connectomes you finagled out from under them? Another sob-story, some idiot who let you rummage around in their brain? Whose?”

“Yours,” Mikhaila said. He could tell she was smiling on the other side of the connection. 

“I really set myself up there, didn’t I?”

“You did.”

“ _ Why?” _

“Because, Morgan,” Mikhaila said, “despite your posturing now, you proved to me back then that you are a good man. You risked your own life for everyone aboard the station over and over again. We would not have survived without you.”

Morgan just grumbled something. 

“What was that?” Alex raised an eyebrow. 

“Fine.”

“Thank you, Morgan. If you want to be involved in the project--” he began. Morgan was not in the mood. He would talk about this with Mikhaila later. They’d been talking more again, but he was a little hurt she hadn’t told him about this. In his defense, if he’d heard about it via transcribe, it might have been even more uncomfortable. 

“I do not,” Morgan said and turned on his heels. “Good luck.”


	2. Chapter 2: Typhon anthrophantasmus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things are taking a turn for the strange.

“Hey. Morgan. Wake up. You’re burning daylight.”

“One more time, Alex, and I’m coming over to shove your transc--” 

Morgan sat upright in the bed. He was still not used to the dizziness. 

“All right, all right, I apologize. Please come see me in the research wing.”

Morgan frowned. The experiments had gone on for days, weeks, and at Morgan’s request his brother had been very light on details. He simply didn’t want to know. Messing with the Typhon was how home had become an apocalyptic wasteland, how almost everyone he’d ever known had died. But if Mikhaila, doctor Igwe, and apparently both Danielle Sho and chief Elazar were on board -- if not physically then at least in spirit -- he felt it was best to give them the benefit of the doubt. But it made his skin crawl. He was deeply uncomfortable with the whole situation, even more uncomfortable than his baseline. 

“What’s wrong, Alex? Do I need to bring my gun?”

There was an uncomfortable silence on the other end of the line. 

“No. Just… come see me. When you’re ready. Take your time.”

That was uncharacteristically laissez-faire of him. Morgan was even more worried now. His brother had a tendency to request immediate attention. He’d never told Morgan to take his time. So, of course, Morgan did exactly that. If this was some kind of reverse-psychology, he wasn’t going to fall for it. He took his morning shower, standing in the hot water for a few minutes with his eyes closed. He always enjoyed that feeling of being a little bit incorporeal, of floating in the cascade. 

Finally, he got dressed, avoiding the mirror again. His mirror image still gave him nightmares sometimes. One red eye always stared back. He shuddered and tried to shake the image from his mind. He put on grey slacks and a black shirt. Alex hadn’t mentioned the suit, so he wasn’t putting it on. He was adamant about that. 

Morgan nudged his coffee cup suspiciously. Something in his brain flexed, ready to kinetically fling it across the room if it didn’t even sound right. He’d been on edge ever since he’d found out there was a Typhon on the station. There was never just one. But with only Alex and him on board, they weren’t going to reproduce. Not at the exponential rate they had back on Talos I, at least. And if Alex died because of the Typhon… it would be his own damn fault, anyway. A full cup of coffee later and Morgan strode through the hallways of Talos IV. 

“Typhon material detected.”

“Morgan Yu. Oh. Four. Five. One.”

“Override detected. Welcome, M. Yu.” Originally, the doors had opened based on voice recognition. The actual phrase hadn’t mattered. But now that there was a Typhon with his memories on board, he wasn’t taking any risks. He followed the red line. His brother met him at the next door. Odd. 

“What happened, Alex. Did you accidentally kill it?” Morgan could only hope Alex had realized his mistake, or through sheer thick-headedness accidentally vented the Typhon. Although the thought of a Typhon outside the hull wasn’t any more pleasant. He hadn’t gone on a space-walk in a while, only making an exception to do some small maintenance once, about a month ago. To Morgan’s disappointment, Alex shook his head.

“Look, Morgan…” Alex began, seemingly expecting his brother to interrupt him. Morgan instead sipped his coffee. He could be quiet and stare if he had to. Let Alex talk. “Before we go inside… there’s something I need you to know.” Morgan raised an eyebrow. “Look… you and I… we haven’t always been…” Alex paused, fumbling and wringing his hands. What was he getting at? How was this even remotely relevant? “We haven’t always been on the best terms. But I need you to know that… I’m still your brother.”

“What did you do, Alex?” Morgan asked coldly. “If you’re asking for forgiveness--”

“No! No.” Alex took a deep breath. “I’m not… This isn’t about me.” 

“What the hell are you talking about?” Morgan was rapidly losing his patience. He hated it when Alex talked in circles. It always felt like he was trying to protect himself, covering for himself. Morgan wasn’t in the mood for it. 

“Look… I’m here for you regardless, Morgan.”

“What did you do, Alex?” he looked past his brother at the door. “What have you and that Typhon been up to in there?!”

“It’s nothing… not quite like that… Just… try not to…” He didn’t finish his sentence. Fantastic. Morgan was, once again, resisting the urge to commit some small violence at his brother for being an insufferably vague bastard.

“Typhon material detected,” the door said. 

“Blow me,” Morgan said out of habit. Two turrets popped out of their boxes next to the door. Oops. A haze of purple surrounded him. He could take these two on with no trouble, but he’d rather not be responsible for his brother’s perforation. Not yet. Not until he knew what was on the other side of the door. 

“Alex Yu! One six five eight!” 

“Override detected. Welcome, A. Yu.” Alex breathed a sigh of relief when the two turrets beeped softly and started scanning the area. Morgan shot them a suspicious glance and he couldn’t help but feel like they gave him the stink-eye right back. Part of him wanted to have a go at their internal systems, but he knew Alex would give him flak for it. They finally walked through the open door. 

“Just keep an open mind, Morgan,” Alex said as they walked through. Morgan wondered what he’d find as he rounded the corner. Another Typhon? Two? Maybe a mimic on a leash? A litter box, maybe? He was too busy being sarcastic in his own head to really pay attention until he looked at the chair that had held the Typhon last time. There was no Typhon in the chair. Instead, there was a woman. Strong shoulder. Asian heritage. She reminded him of his mother. She was strapped into the chair and regarded him curiously. 

“Who is this, Alex?” he said as he looked between her and his brother. He also quickly scanned the room for the Operators, but only saw the four models stacked in a corner, turned off. “Why aren’t the others here?”

“We decided it was best to give you some privacy,” Alex said. He was clearly being careful about something. He seemed… guilty? That wasn’t quite it. He was clearly dealing with something, but Morgan couldn’t put his finger on it. When had he brought someone else aboard? He wasn’t even aware there were that many people he didn’t know personally. Maybe one of the techs on board Talos II? A horrifying thought occurred to Morgan.

“Have you been experimenting on people again, Alex?” he snarled. He clenched his fists. He’d decided that morning not to attack his brother, but every time they spoke it was like Alex was dead set on getting his teeth kicked in. 

“No! No. I think… I think it’s best if I let her tell you… Just… try not to kill... it.” Alex trailed off, and then just… left the room without another word. Morgan stared at the back of his head with confused exasperation. One of these days, Morgan was going to have a good old yell at his brother. Screaming into his pillow at night didn’t cut it anymore. The frustration of being this… abomination was getting to him and his brother just made things worse. He turned to the woman in the chair.

“So wh--” he began, and stopped when her eyes locked onto his. They were grey, like his, but they reflected… blue? Slightly purple? But what had really arrested him, what had grabbed his attention by the throat and held it up against the light, was that deep inside, as if he was staring across the vast gulf of space at a single star, were two pinpricks of light. He thought he was imagining it at first, but there was most definitely something in her eyes. A flicker he recognised and definitely didn’t want to recognize.

“Good morning, Morgan,” she said calmly. This was impossible. This was wrong. She was an abomination and she shouldn’t be here. He started to panic but realized she was tied down, couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t get to him. But who was she? What was she? He took a deep breath but didn’t lower his guard. The psionic field around him shimmered as he readied himself to do what he had to.

“You’re not going to like what I have to say next.”

She could have said anything else and it wouldn’t have changed his mind. Not really. But one single phrase had frozen him in his tracks. He looked at her, into her eyes where the two little lights flickered and burned, as if he was searching for something he desperately didn’t want to be there. 

“You’re the Typhon,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He knew. He’d seen those eyes in the dark so many, too many times, murdering the entire population of Talos I. He’d recognize them anywhere, no matter how small they were, no matter how human the face in front of them. But whose face was this? Why this face, that reminded him of his mother of all people? Why did this face set his skin on fire?

“Yes,” she said. “Alex told me.”

He frowned. “What do you mean? You don’t… know?”

She shook her head, never taking her eyes off his. It was the most intense gaze he’d ever been under the scrutiny of in his life, and knowing his father, that meant something. She had an intensity to her that reminded him of a look he avoided these days. Usually, he made sure to put a foggy mirror between himself and that look. He pushed that thought aside. It made him want to scratch at his skull. He wondered if she was part telepath, deliberately making him uncomfortable, trying to get inside his head. 

“No,” she said softly. “I thought I was… I thought I was human.” She paused and finally looked down. When she looked up at him, there was genuine emotion in her eyes. She looked sorrowful. “Like you.”

He gritted his teeth. “I’m nothing like you,” he said. He almost sobbed. This creature was making him violently uncomfortable. Why was she doing this?

“Who are you supposed to be, then?” he said as he began to pace back and forth. He had to know whose face she was wearing. If she was Typhon, she could be mimicking someone, but she had to have a template. Was there a body stuffed in a closet somewhere on the station, someone Alex had been experimenting on? Was this how he’d achieved empathy?

“Morgan,” she said.

“What? What do you want from me?”

“No,” she said softly. “My name is Morgan.”

“No,” he cried out. “It isn’t.”

“My name is Morgan Yu.”


	3. Chapter 3: Transtar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This conversation was inevitable.

“Show me,” he said. He walked over to the screens and typed in the commands, resetting the program of the Looking Glass V3.1. trying to load up the memories, or at least giving the-- the thing in the chair the ability to do so. 

“Show you what?” she asked. She seemed genuinely confused. Perhaps she thought he wanted her to show him all the choices she’d made aboard Talos I? 

“Show me,” he said between clenched teeth as he typed in command after command that was responded to with error after error. Why was this blasted console not obeying? “You say you’ve always been like…. Like this? Show me, then! Show me what little girl Morgan’s life looked like.” His breath was rasping, as if he had trouble breathing. “Show me what it was like.”

“Morgan, you’re smarter than this,” the Typhon said. “We’re smarter than this.” He whipped around. The sheer frustration, anxiety and panic of what was going on already had him on edge. His hair clung to his forehead and his eyes had trouble focusing. A creature was snarling in his hindbrain and he was doing what it could to get it to shut up, sit down, roll over and, most importantly, play dead. But the Typhon wasn’t done. “I remember only what you do. There is no more little girl Morgan.”

“What do you mean, ‘no more’?” he snarled. “There was nev--” he began and stopped and started pacing up and down the metal floor. “There was never--” he tried again, and again his voice caught in his throat. He didn’t remember his childhood. There were records, of course. And he’d managed to access some video files and even a diary or two from back then. But he was never… He didn’t remember… He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes to think. It was getting hard to think. He rubbed his face and looked at the creature again. “Why are you like this?” he asked. If she was really as smart as he was, she’d know what he meant. She looked up at him and she had the utter and complete audacity to give him a look of pity. 

“I think you know that better than I do, Morgan,” she said softly. “This body... it’s been like this since the memories of Talos I settled. I…” she paused, looking for the right words. Morgan looked at her intensely. He didn’t know what he wanted from her, asking that question. It was hard to focus, his own brain was fighting him and he didn’t know whose side he was on. There was a war happening in his brain and the explosions were making him wince. “I just look like this,” she finally said carefully, “because that’s how your memories frame you. That’s what it felt like to be Morgan Yu.” 

He shook his head and paced left and right again. He kept raising and lowering his hand to make one point or another, but didn’t actually manage to speak for several uncomfortable seconds. He was unraveling under his own scrutiny. His boots clanked heavily on the steel deck. Some words finally decided to cooperate and he turned to the creature in the chair. It seemed frustratingly calm and he knew that that calm was his, when he was confronting people. He’d driven some people incredibly angry by calmly looking at them while they ranted away at him. He felt like an idiot for being so unnerved by it now that the tables had been turned on him. 

It didn’t help that she looked like his mother. Hell, she looked like him, only… pretty, instead of rugged. Typhon-Morgan was beautiful and he would have been completely taken by her if he’d met her before. He shook his head.

“You would have…” he paused, his words interrupted by a thought that he shook away. “You would have seen yourself in the mirror.” He felt almost triumphant at that. If she’d really had his memories, she wouldn’t have seen someone else in the mirror. She would have seen him, so this image she was basing herself on must not have come from him. But she wasn’t having it. She shook her head. He took a step back. He knew he could talk circles around people. It was what he was good at. Not to mention the fact that the Typhon material floating around in his brain had made him faster, smarter than he’d been before. 

“No, Morgan,” she said calmly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, then looked him in the eye with those little pinpricks of light deep inside and he hated how calm and relaxed she looked. He knew that, when he’d looked in the mirror this morning, he’d looked cagey, cagey as always. “You never looked in the mirror much, Morgan,” she said. “By the time I saw my own reflection, your face is not the one I saw.”

Memories drifted at him, mornings on Talos I where he’d turned the corner before turning on the light, taking a shower before brushing his teeth with a foggy mirror as a shield between him and his reflection. He shoved them away. “What about the Looking Glass recordings?” he asked. He was afraid of the response. To a certain extent, he already knew what the answer would be. He didn’t want to know, of course. 

“The Morgan Yu who made those recordings is dead,” she said. “They were dead before I woke up on Talos I and likely had been for months. You know that. And they weren’t… you.” She looked at him with those beautiful eyes and he could feel them boring into him as if she could see into his soul. “There’s a reason you didn’t do what they asked.”

He shook his head. “No, that person was still… me, a different version of me that I don’t remember but it was still me. A terrible person, yeah. And I never forgave them for their crimes on Talos I. But still... me.” He hoped she hadn’t noticed that fact that he’d almost validated her existence. It was very hard not to think of her as a person, someone with his memories, sure, but a person nonetheless. She was a Typhon, he reminded himself. She was as much Morgan Yu as a Mimic was a real cup. 

“I disagree,” she said. “And I know you do too. It’s what kept us from falling apart when the hard decisions came. When the consequences of that person’s actions were ours to bear.” She looked past him at the operators stacked in the corner. “I like to think I’m a fairly faithful incarnation,” she said softly. “You told Mikhaila too, didn’t you?”

He finally, for the first time, took a deep breath. Morgan sat down on a stool and rubbed his face. “Yeah. I had to. Of course I did. Not telling her would have been…” 

“Amoral,” Typhon-Morgan said. “Wrong.” He just nodded and looked at her. As he understood from Alex’s explanation, she’d been started off at his earliest point of memory. That meant she’d made a lot of the same choices he had. It meant she’d understood the hard choice of telling Mikhaila what past-him had done.

Typhon-Morgan looked at him again. She seemed a little more confident. He was angry at himself for finding her joy infectious. It was a completely new face but something about seeing it smile made something inside of him happy in a way he didn’t know how to put into words. “I hate them too, you know,” the Typhon said. 

“Who?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“The person, the Morgan Yu who did all those unforgivable things on board Talos I.” He nodded again. She was right. They were very synchronised. She was a very faithful incarnation of him. But she kept talking. “I hate them for how callous they were with human lives. How casually they committed atrocities. Their gruff voice and rough face. The shaggy beard. Those big hands that looked like they could only commit violence.” Her tone had shifted completely. She’d started talking triumphantly, to show her understanding of his feelings, but now she spoke with venom. 

He knew what she was talking about and really, truly, deeply wished he didn’t. He wished he didn’t know what she was talking about, that he never looked at his hands and balled them into fists until his knuckles went white and his nails had dug so deeply into the palms of his hands it made tears roll down his face, until he’d stopped shaking. He wished he didn’t avoid looking in the mirror because of how monstrous his reflection was to him. He wished he didn’t remember those Looking Glass recordings of himself, the person he wanted to reach across time to strangle. The Typhon sighed deeply. He realized that she’d felt about that recording the same way. He looked at her slender hands. He wondered if she had that problem, now. 

“You don’t look at your hands the same way, do you?” he asked. 

She shook her head. “No.” She moved her hand as freely as she could, considering the constraints, and looked at the back of it inquisitively. “I see a woman’s hands. Slender. Beautiful, even. My hands. Nobody else’s.” She looked at him, her eyes boring a hole through the back of his skull with how intense they were. “They never felt like someone else’s, Morgan. These are my hands, beautiful, feminine, and they’ve never pushed the button that condemned an innocent person to death.”

It felt almost like an indictment. She seemed to be able to read him like a book. Was she holding it against him that his hands did feel like that to him? That the thought of being that figure in the Looking Glass was him was still tearing him apart, even after so much time? “What…” he said. The rest of the question died unspoken in his throat.

“The person who did those things is not you, Morgan. It never was. The person who woke up that day on Talos I was a new Morgan Yu. It was you. And you were kind, empathetic, and you saved a lot of people. Alex told me. You were not and are not the monster you saw in that digital mirror.” The Typhon paused and then looked him in the eye with that unrelenting intensity. 

“That’s not you, Morgan Yu. If the face in the image makes you sick to your stomach, maybe it’s not you. If the thought of that Morgan Yu makes you this angry and upset, what reason is there for you to look like them?”

She paused and looked at him, studying his face. He knew the tired lines she could see, the sunken eyes that were always tired, the carefully managed eyebrows above them-- they became a single horizontal line if he didn’t. He felt the urge to turn away but being able to return a stare was something he prided himself on. It was hard, especially considering what she was saying. Finally, his resolve broke and he looked down at his hands. At his hairy arms. He balled his fists again. He was crying. Why was he crying? 

“You aren’t that person, Morgan.” 

He looked up at her, almost pleading. He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how she was able to look into his head and arrest his thoughts before they came to him and he didn’t know how to stop her from doing it or if he wanted her to. She sounded insane and made so much sense it made his heart hurt. His head was throbbing with every heartbeat. He tried to think about what was being said but his internal monologue had been reduced to incoherent screaming, his superego a cradling itself in a corner of his mind. 

She smiled so softly and so genuinely and with so much care it almost made him weep. If she really was Morgan, she was the best version of Morgan Yu he could have ever imagined. Finally she said the thing, the thing he wanted her to say and had almost begged her not to. 

“You don’t have to look like them if you don’t want to.”


	4. Chapter 4: Chief Ilyushin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes you have to be a cup for a bit.

“I know you’re in there, Morgan,” Alex said. He had his hands on his hips and looked disapprovingly at the cupboard. He’d probably searched everywhere else and had concluded where Morgan was. Not that Morgan was going to give him the satisfaction of responding. Not verbally, anyway. He needed to be alone, Alex had to understand that, and yet here he was, haughtily demanding his attention. 

Alex sighed and opened the cupboard. In it were all the things one might expect to reasonably find in a cupboard, although a small station as barebones as this did have some very expensive ceramic. Courtesy of Transtar going under, there were dozens of everything. There were exactly thirteen cups on the shelf. Alex had counted. 

“I will use all of these for coffee,” Alex said, “until you talk to me.” He was speaking vaguely in the direction of the cups. Morgan assumed it was because he didn’t want to run the risk of addressing one when he’d been disguised as another. He felt a little bit of malicious glee about that. Still, he wasn’t going to risk Alex’s coffee. For the first time in his life, Alex had been forced to make it himself, and it was about as good as you’d expect. His coffee was  _ chunky _ .

Slowly, the Transtar logo began to fade on the leftmost cup. Alex looked at it with his usual glare and raised an eyebrow. “Well? Are you going to sit in here all day and sulk?” He probably expected Morgan to turn back any second. Not that Morgan was going to give him the satisfaction. Slowly, the gold lettering began to reappear. In the beautiful Art Deco font that was the hallmark of the Transtar corporation, new words wrote themselves on its surface. 

“FUCK OFF,” the cup said. 

“Why are you doing this, Morgan?” Alex said. He leaned against the small countertop. Morgan hoped he felt really dumb, talking to a cup as if it was a person. Morgan wasn’t here! It was just cups! The lettering faded again. It took a minute for new ones to appear. 

“KINDLY FUCK OFF,” the lettering now said, slightly smaller.

“I will ask Mikhaila to come here and talk to you if you won’t act like an adult. You know I will.”

If a cup could sigh, this one would. It didn’t move in any perceptible way, but it suddenly had an air of sullen frustration. The letters faded again. Alex raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms, waiting for his brother to change back, or at least give a coherent response. Instead, the Transtar logo appeared again. Alex rolled his eyes, closed the cupboard and left the room, muttering “Be that way,” just before closing the door. 

Sweet silence. Gentle darkness. Morgan didn’t have eyes right now. Cups, except some of those novelty ones, didn’t have eyes either, but Morgan  _ was _ aware of his environment. Being a cup made the world a lot flatter. After the Talos I incident, he had found refuge in, well, the cupboard. Mimicking a cup allowed him to tune out the world, turn off his brain and not  _ feel _ everything so keenly. As a cup, his body wasn’t his body. It was a cup. 

No cup lasts forever, though, and when Mikhaila walked in, Morgan was once again Morgan-shaped, his arms crossed as he looked at Earth through the porthole. He’d been a cup long enough. He’d had his time to not-think. And while it was always pleasant to mess with his brother, he couldn’t really avoid Mikhaila. They’d been too close. And he respected her, which was more than he could say for his brother. Sure, he knew he was a good scientist. But Alex had a lot to make up for. Mikhaila didn’t. She was a fundamentally good person. She deserved better than to have a conversation with a cup. 

As much as he wanted to tell her to go away, he needed to be honest with her. Even if that carried the risk of being honest with himself. Right now, the outcome of that would be less than pleasant. He didn’t want to face the thing that had been screaming inside his head. It couldn’t scream inside a cup, but he couldn’t stay cup forever. 

“Morgan,” Mikhaila said. It wasn’t a question. There was no hesitation in her voice. Morgan didn’t turn around. He didn’t have the energy to face her, even if she was broadcasting through an operator. He was going to have to, eventually, but he was stalling. He imagined they both knew it, deep down. He imagined she could tell. But there wasn’t much she could do about it, constrained as she was by the --

“Morgan,” she repeated, and touched him on the arm. He spun around. Mikhaila stood in front of him. He always managed to forget just how imposing a figure she struck when she was in the same room as him. Her cheekbones looked sharp enough to cut glass. There weren’t many who had the same intense look in their eyes the way she did. If he hadn’t looked into the Typhon’s that very day, he wouldn’t have been able to remember the last time he’d been looked at like that. Like someone could peer into him. He hated it, but it’s what he loved about her. It’s why, after the Talos I event, they’d stayed close. She could see him for who he really was, and he felt more _ genuine _ around her. 

They’d agreed to stay just that though. Close, but not too close. Morgan felt too… he couldn’t imagine the thought of being in a relationship the way he was right now. He’d given it thought, at first, but his rough hands on her skin felt  _ wrong _ . Like he’d be defiling something good and beautiful. He knew he’d be apologizing for not being good enough every step of the relationship. He hoped that she understood that. That she knew the problem wasn’t her, that it was him, in the most sincere possible way. The way she looked at him, he could tell she did. Her usually hard gaze softly caressed his face. He felt hideous, the way she looked at him with caring. He felt  _ repulsive _ .

“Morgan,” she said a third time. He was doing what he could to keep it together, and having a hard time of it. She was too kind to him, and probably always had been. 

“How…” he began. “When did you even get here? I don’t --” He lightly shook his head as if to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. 

“I docked earlier,” she said. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear. I’m afraid I’m better at fixing these damn guidance systems than I am at guiding them.” She flashed him an apologetic smile. 

“Oh,” he said. “What are you doing here?” He hadn’t meant for that to sound as dismissive as it did, but he felt he had little control over his voice. It always sounded too rough to him. He often felt he had to constantly oversteer or be seen as  _ that _ Morgan Yu. The old one. The one he hated so much. 

“Alex asked me to come here,” she said. 

“Of course he did,” Morgan said with a sigh. “What did he tell you?”

She bit her lip and stood next to him to look out the window at Earth. 

“It looks so peaceful from up here, doesn’t it?” Changing the subject as if it was the most normal business in the world, she crossed her arms. Her eyes flitted across the blue-and-yellow planet’s surface. 

“Yeah,” Morgan said. If she was going to play games, he could play along. Better this than what he feared she might start saying. “The Coral doesn’t look so bad from up here.”

They stood next to each other for what felt like a lifetime. Somewhere on the ship, a digital clock counted the minutes as they passed. Talos IV continued its gentle orbit. Morgan and Mikhaila stood next to each other and looked out into space. It was pleasant. He hadn’t been in Mikhaila’s presence for some time, and having her there with him was soothing, to a certain extent. It was pleasant for as long as he could ignore the urge to reach out to her, to hold her. That urge was disturbing to him and it made him feel vile. Not because of her. She was perfectly wonderful. Because of him. 

“I love you, you know,” Mikhaila said. It was the worst possible thing she could have said, and the best. He felt much the same, of course. But they’d talked about this before. Bringing it out into the open again now was simply painful.

“I -- I know, but --” he began. He’d planned on reminding her of the agreement they’d made, that them being together was not something he felt he could do. But she wasn’t going to let him. She turned to him with those two steely eyes of hers fixed on his. His voice caught in his throat. He, those eyes said clearly, had misunderstood what she meant.

“I love you, Morgan. Even if you don’t look like you used to.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. He knew what he thought she meant. But he needed to hear it from her.

“If you want to look different, you won’t be a different person to me,” she said, her eyes hard but her voice soft. “You’ll be the  _ good _ person who woke up on Talos I and saved my life.” She put a hand on his arm. He almost winced, as if he was about to be touched with a hot poker. She wasn’t going to let him retreat into himself like that, though, and kept her arm in place.

“You’re a good person, Morgan. That person is the one I love. And from what I heard, that person doesn’t...” she paused. He could see it in her eyes. She was about to say the thing. The thing that made him want to throw himself out the porthole. “It doesn’t sound like that person looks like this.” She forced out her words towards the end of her sentence. It was clearly hard for her to say this. He wondered if that was because she was forcing herself to accept something about him she was struggling with, or because she felt she was hurting him. 

Morgan frowned. “Alex didn’t tell you that,” he said. 

She shook her head. “I talked to her,” she said, confirming his fears. He couldn’t have forbidden her from talking to the Typhon, of course, and he couldn’t hold it against her. He’d felt morbid curiosity himself when he went to see the damn thing. But he feared what it -- what she’d told Mikhaila.  _ Anything but the truth,  _ a little voice in the back of his head said. He told it to shut the fuck up. 

“Do you think,” Mikhaila asked, “that she looks like what you were supposed to look like?”

He shook his head. “I don’t --” he began, and rubbed his face. “I couldn’t even… I’m not…”

“You couldn’t what?” she asked. She seemed to want to help him, but a part of her seemed annoyed, even frustrated. 

“I could never look like…” he began and let the sentence peter out vaguely. The whole question was moot, the way he saw it. Why ask it if the answer was impossible? What was the point? He could never, so he  _ should _ never. The question itself was cursed, and he couldn’t answer it properly. That was if he even  _ deserved _ to. He looked at his hands, and couldn’t imagine them being anything but repulsive to him.

“Morgan,” she said, and she seemed genuinely annoyed now. Her frown deepened and she gently raised her hand and slapped him. It wasn’t very hard, but it shook him out of his self-flagellation. 

“What?!” he said/asked incredulously. “What was that for?”

“You,” she said, waving a finger in his face, “are the dumbest smart person I know.” Something about the way she said that made it almost feel like a term of endearment. Morgan shook his head. He didn’t understand what she meant. She rolled her eyes and took his face in her hands. 

“You can turn into a  _ cup, _ Morgan. You can look like whatever the _ hell _ you want!”


End file.
